Newspapers: The fountain of youth?
Well, yes and no, if journalism ethicist Ed Wasserman's Miami Herald column is to be believed:
... I'm interested in a related phenomenon, which has less to do with overall numbers than with a generational shift.When you consider who is being discarded in the various waves of right-sizing that the news business has indulged in to keep its owners, if not its customers, satisfied, you stumble on the unsettling truth that the advance guard of an entire newsroom generation is being shown the door, 10 or 15 years before they would, in the normal course of things, have finished their working lives. ...
I had a conversation a year or two ago with an ex-reporter, who had long experience covering national security, about why his newspaper, one of the country's best, had fallen into lockstep in reporting credulously on the run-up to the Iraq war and had underplayed fierce dissent within our government. He said, essentially, that the coverage decisions were being made by people who weren't acquainted with the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the Iran-contra affair, or the other landmark late 20th century instances of official U.S. deceit or ineptitude. So they got snookered.
That was a disturbing answer. It made me realize that managing generational change is a delicate matter of achieving a balance of memory and energy, the seasoned and the fresh, certainty and skepticism. It's a matter not of lowering costs, but of carefully calibrating a newsroom culture. And it's a challenge that, I'm afraid, is being blown.
I'm more than a year into newsroom codgerdom being old enough to sue for age discrimination, should I be so moved. That's kind of sobering, inasmuch as I've been saying for a while now that 50 is the new 30, or at least the new 35.
On the other hand, I still think this Internet thingie is a passing fad, I still haven't figured out what "blugging" is and you kids need to get off my lawn.
